Vegetable Gardening (112 page)
If you're growing
indeterminate
varieties, which keep growing and producing fruit all season, choose or build cages large enough to support the huge plants that will grow. Also be sure to secure them to the ground well so they don't blow over during a summer thunderstorm. (You can read more on indeterminate tomatoes in Chapter 4.)
Construct string or wire trellises, like you do for beans and peas.
Fighting Weed Wars
A
weed
is any plant that's growing where you don't want it to. Some weeds are worse than others, but in general, you don't want any weeds in your vegetable garden because they compete with vegetables for light, water, and nutrients. If you have a lot of weeds, you'll have weaker plants and a less substantial harvest. Besides, weeds look terrible.
The key to battling weeds is to get to them early before they're firmly established. When they're young, weeds are easier to pull, easier to till under, and less likely to produce seeds that cause problems down the road. In the following sections, I show you how to fight weeds before and after you plant your veggies.
Making a preemptive strike on weeds
You can reduce weeds in your vegetable beds many different ways. Here are some things that you can do before planting your garden:
Presprout weed seeds.
Presprouting
— forcing weed seeds to germinate before you plant so you can kill them early — really cuts down on the number of weeds in your beds. Follow these steps:
1. Prepare your planting bed several weeks before you're ready to plant.
Refer to Chapter 3 for details on planning and preparing your beds for planting.
2. Water the soil well and wait a few days.
Presto, young weeds begin popping up.
3. Kill the weeds.
You can choose to kill the weeds one of two ways: pull them out by hand, or rake the bed lightly to uproot the seedlings and then let them dry out to die.
However you get rid of the young weeds, disturb the soil as little as possible when you do it; otherwise, you'll bring more seeds to the surface.
Plan for easy weeding.
Leave enough room between rows so you can weed the soil easily.
Solarize the soil.
When you
solarize
the soil, you use the power of the sun to kill weeds. This technique works best in the middle of summer in hot climates like Arizona and Florida. The only downside to solarizing is that it takes a while. Follow these steps to solarize your soil:
1. Prepare your bed for planting and water it well.
2. Dig a 6-to-12-inch-deep trench around the perimeter of the bed.
3. Cover the entire bed with thick clear plastic (4 millimeters) and place the edges of the plastic in the trenches and fill the trenches with soil. Then wait.
The temperature gets so hot underneath the plastic that it kills insects, disease organisms, and weeds. It usually takes a few months of solarizing to get a beneficial effect.
Plant your vegetables at the proper time of year.
That way they get off to a fast start, and weeds have a harder time catching up with them. See Chapter 3 for details.
Battling weeds after planting
If you come across weeds after you plant your crops, you have several choices for eliminating them:
Mulch your beds.
Applying a layer of thick organic mulch is one of the best ways to battle weeds. Even if mulch doesn't smother the weeds and their seeds, the weeds that do come up are easy to pull. Planting through plastic is also an effective way to keep weeds from becoming a problem. See the earlier section "Keeping Your Plants Cozy and Weed Free with Mulch" for more information.
Pull the weeds by hand.
While they're young, weeds come out of the ground easily. Get 'em roots and all, whenever you see them. If you can't pull out the roots by hand, use a trowel.
Cultivate the soil.
Simply hoeing or lightly turning the soil between vegetables exposes the weeds' roots and kills many of them. Cultivating is most effective when it's done often (a few times a week in the first month or so of gardening) and early when the weeds are small. Some cultivating tools are designed especially for this purpose; see Chapter 20 for details.